The Lascar's Dagger (18 page)

He stopped talking to drain the last of his ale, then added, “Prime Valerian Fox is one of those men. Don’t know how I know. Never done anything to me, but I
know
. He’s an evil man. Not just dishonest, or untrustworthy.
Evil
. He’d not only squash you under his heel, but he’d walk over your dead body and hardly even notice, let alone care. There’s something about Saker Rampion
in particular
that he doesn’t like.”

“And you don’t know what it is. This sounds like a silly riddle to me.”

“Ah yes, riddle me, riddle me, riddle-me-ree. ‘Person who makes it sells it. Person who buys it never uses it, person who uses it doesn’t know it. What is it?’ That’s exactly why I wouldn’t say anything earlier. You wouldn’t have listened, because it would have sounded so silly. Now perhaps you will, because it doesn’t sound quite so stupid, does it?”

Saker was silent. Juster continued, “And I’ll tell you one more thing. Almost all those evil men were Lowmians.”

“Fox isn’t Lowmian.”

“His mother was Lowmian, and Fox himself was born in Ustgrind. There’s a darkness growing in Lowmeer.”

“Va damn it, Juster! Must you be so ambiguous?”

“Did you know that one of my relatives on my mother’s side was the Regal’s first wife?”

“No. No, I didn’t.”

“She was also a cousin of King Edwayn’s. Ten years married to the Regal, and she was childless and unhappy. Then she died. Her father always thought the Regal murdered her. She smuggled out a hurriedly scribbled note to him, saying she feared for her life because she’d found out the truth about the Dire Sweepers.”

“What are they?”

“She said they were a band of assassins under the Regal’s orders. That was all she had time to write. She died of a stomach complaint the very next day. The Regal said her illness made her irrational, and King Edwayn chose to believe that. Perhaps it was even true.”

“But you don’t believe it.”

He fiddled with his tankard, not meeting Saker’s eyes. “I tell everyone I’m a privateer because I’m a born greedy adventurer. Untrue. Ah, well, let’s say
partially
untrue. The other part is because there is something in Lowmeer that frightens me. Not the ordinary citizen, who’s just like you or me, but something deep and dark. I want to keep that land bog-weak, and privateering is my way of doing it.” He looked up. “No matter what happens in the future, remember that. Juster Dornbeck is scared of something at the very heart of Lowmeer. And you ought to be frightened,
because Valerian Fox told you his plan
. A man shares that kind of secret only with a fellow conspirator – or someone easily cozened into doing something stupid. You don’t want to be either.”

He stood, tossing some coins down on the table for the ale. Saker sat and watched as he walked away, slipping a coin into the cleavage of the barmaid on his way out. From the grin she gave him, she was an old friend.

He remained, nursing the last of his ale, until he’d worked out the answer to the riddle.

A coffin.

Back in his room that evening, he lay on his bed with his hands behind his head, deep in thought. His mind kept churning up the same indigestible fact that he couldn’t explain: the Prime had displayed courage and compassion by staying in the north during an extended epidemic of the Horned Death. He’d worked tirelessly with no thought for his own safety.

Fox himself had said little about his part; the details had come from the servants who’d accompanied him – the coachmen, his manservant, his scribe, his page. The idea of doing something like that himself scared Saker witless, but every account he’d heard included fulsome praise of the Prime. He was already doubting his own interpretation of events, but it wasn’t Fox’s words that had sowed the seeds of his uncertainty. It was the nobility of the man’s actions.

A knock roused him from his reverie. When he opened the door, one of the footmen was standing there. “Begging your pardon, witan,” he said, “but I was wondering if this was yours. One of the gardeners found it under your window.”

He held out his open hand. The lascar’s kris lay on his palm.

There was nothing Saker could do but reach out and take it back.

W
hen Saker delivered his next official report to Faith House, late one afternoon, he did not return to the palace afterwards. On each previous visit to the House, he’d studied the layout of the building carefully. Several times he’d pretended to lose himself in the labyrinthine corridors, so that he had a ready explanation for being discovered where he had no right to be. No one had made much of it, merely laughing and saying they’d got lost too, at first.

He’d found what he was seeking, a room that was little more than a cupboard, empty and dusty and forgotten, tucked away under the eaves on the top floor in the same wing as the Prime’s office.

Now, after giving his latest report to Secretary Pedding, he headed upwards, walking purposefully with a sheaf of papers in his hand, ignoring the clerks and clerics scurrying by on their own errands. He’d learned long ago that a man could get away with much if he looked busy. Once he reached the cupboard without anyone remarking on his presence, he shut himself in, jamming the door so it could not be opened from outside. He already knew that although all visitors were vetted by clerical guards on entering, no one checked afterwards to see if a visitor had actually left.

He took off his witan’s robe and used it to block the gap under the door. Underneath he was wearing his working clothes: dull and dark and comfortable, containing numerous pouches and pockets to hide useful items. From one such he drew out his tinderbox, flint and steel; from another a four-hour candle inside a small collapsible lantern of his own design. Once it was lit, he reduced the light to little more than a glimmer by manipulating the lantern shutters.

He settled down to wait. From time to time footsteps passed the door, and he heard occasional laughter or snatches of conversation. At nightfall, those sounds ceased.

When the candle was almost done, he lit another. When that was half burned, he opened the door and stepped out into the silent building. He stood for a long time, listening. Faith House was home to the Prime and most of his numerous staff, but they lived in a different wing. He was still in the administrative side and, he hoped, at this time of the night the offices would be empty.

When he was sure no one moved anywhere nearby, he reached back into the cupboard and picked up his discarded robe and the lantern. His sword and the lascar’s dagger were both sheathed at his waist, one on either side. His shoes were his soft leather ones that made no sound on the boards.

He made for the stairs, but did not descend the treads. He already knew they creaked. Instead, he slid down the banisters. From the bottom, it wasn’t far to the Prime’s office, and it was the work of moments to pick the primitive lock on the door. Obviously the Prime was supremely confident that no one would ever dare to break in.

He stepped into the outer office where Secretary Pedding usually sat, relocked the door from the inside and threw his robe over the back of the secretary’s chair. The lascar’s dagger writhed at his hip. He cursed it under his breath, drew it from its sheath and laid it down on Pedding’s desk before he began to search.

His task was made all the more difficult because he had no real idea what he was looking for, and he needed to take scrupulous care to leave no clues behind. Pedding’s office yielded nothing except ledgers of data on Ardrone’s numerous clerics, religious establishments and shrines.

The second room was the office where Valerian Fox received visitors. He spent an hour there, but once again found nothing that indicated anything except meticulous record-keeping, much of it in Fox’s bold hand. Every time the Prime had a visitor, he’d recorded the name, the date, the topic discussed and decisions made. Sometimes there were more personal observations on the character or appearance of those visiting. “Slovenly,” said one comment. “Capable and unimaginative,” said another. Saker could not resist looking up his own name, only to find there was no comment at all, not even on his first visit, or his last.

And that was a curious omission.

When he moved on to the third room, he found the door locked. This time it took him almost half an hour to conquer the locking mechanism, which he took as a sign that there would be something worth hiding within.

At first glance it appeared to be no more than a pleasant sitting room with a large fireplace, rugs, chairs and an embroidered banner, twice his height and four paces broad, hanging on the wall. The embroidery portrayed an oak tree, its twigs in full summer leaf, and its root system branching below the ground.

And that was a curious decoration to have on the wall of a man who despised everything about the Way of the Oak. He lifted it to look behind.

A number of shelves were recessed into the stone wall, and they were filled with more ledgers. One by one he opened them and read a few pages of each. Some were lists of names and payments; others were labelled “Resources”. He could make little sense of what he saw, but it appeared to be no more than more information-collecting. Yet … why hide the ledgers under the banner?

He was running out of time. He committed some of the names and amounts to memory, hoping that when he had time to think, he might be able to see some kind of pattern.

Letting the banner drop, he was about to return the way he’d come when a flash of silver slithering across the floor caught his eye. His first horrified reaction, that it was a snake, gave way to an almost equally appalled realisation that it was the dagger. It wriggled – fast – past him, the blade as sinuous and supple as any serpent, dragging the more static hilt behind it like an unwanted cart, and stopped two paces in front of the banner, where it coalesced back into a dagger once more, just metal and bone.

Saker gathered his scattered wits and bent to pick it up. Before his fingers could grasp the handle, it shot upwards, spinning, to bury itself point first into the base of the embroidered tree trunk. Aghast, he raised his lantern to look.

Pox ’n’ pustules, you misbegotten offspring of a lascar!

He pulled it out carefully, then jammed it savagely back into its sheath. His heart sank when he examined the cut it had made. It was all too obvious, and the threads around it had begun to unravel. He groaned. So much for secrecy.

In the slim hope that he might be able to disguise some of the damage by pulling threads through to the reverse side, he lifted the banner once more, this time to look at the back. When he raised the candle to see better, he was transfixed. The embroidery on the wrong side bore no resemblance to that on the front.

He was staring not at an oak tree, but at a family tree, an embroidered lineage diagram. At the top was a crest, not one he ever remembered seeing, featuring a pizzled red fox running across the field of the escutcheon, a white goose gripped in its mouth. The fox was grinning.

Underneath were the embroidered names and dates and linking lines that made up the family ancestry. The top entries were faded, as if they’d been made long ago; the final name at the bottom, sewn with bright red thread, was Valerian Fox – and the dagger had neatly sliced through the Prime’s first name.

No sooner had he absorbed that much than the candle guttered and he was blinking in a blackness so deep he could have been rendered blind. The darkness was total because all the windows were tightly shuttered.

He swore. He didn’t have another candle. Groping, he retraced his way to Pedding’s office. Once there, his questing fingers found his robe. Then, still cursing, he remembered he hadn’t relocked the door to the inner sitting room. He had to go back.

While he was still feeling his way through the doorway into the Prime’s office, he heard a key inserted into the main door. Horrified, he shut the office door, then blundered across the room, mercifully without noise, despite bruising his shins on a chair and knocking his elbow on the side of the Prime’s desk.

Creeping his way along the wall, he found the entrance to the sitting room, slipped inside and closed the door. His fingers fumbled with his lock picks, as he tried to remember the sequence that would lock it again. Fortunately it was something he did by feel rather than sight, and he let out the breath he’d been holding when he heard the lock click into place.

If the newcomer had heard it, or if he wanted something from the sitting room, he was doomed. There was no hiding place. The only exit was through a shuttered window three storeys above the ground.

No, wait. There was a fireplace. Va, what he wouldn’t give for a light! He crept across the room, his robe tucked under an arm, until his shoe stubbed on the iron fireguard. He ducked down into the empty fireplace, glad that the grate was newly cleaned. Feeling around with his fingers, he pushed open the iron damper until it lay flat against the back of the bricks of the chimney flue. It was a wide opening, allowing him to stand up inside the actual chimney. He looked up. Far above he could see the light of a moonlit sky filtering in through chimney pots.

He fumbled around at the wall in front of him, until he felt a chimney sweep’s climbing rung. Good, he could climb out. Hurriedly he pulled his witan’s robe on over his head; it was easier to wear than carry, and he couldn’t leave it behind.

And just then he heard the unmistakable sound of a key turning in the lock of the door behind him.

Gripping the rung, he hauled his knees and feet up. With infinite care, hanging by one hand, he reached his other hand down to close the damper, and to do it in utter silence. Just before he edged it shut, the room beyond flooded with candlelight.

He only relaxed when the chimney plunged back into darkness as the damper slotted into place. Taking a deep breath, he began to climb. The chimney flue was narrow, the robe was cumbersome and the dust of ash and soot made him ache to sneeze or cough. Every now and then he dislodged a shower of soot. Because he’d closed the damper, none of it would billow out into the room, but he worried that the noise of its fall would signal his presence. He hitched up his robe between his legs and climbed as if someone was about to light a fire under him.